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{download Best} Demian: Die Geschichte einer JugendAuthor Hermann Hesse –

Emil Sinclair Ist Ein Junge, Der In Einem Als Scheinwelt Beschrieben B Rgerlichen Elternhaus Aufgewachsen Ist Dies Ist Die Dramatische Geschichte Seines Abstiegs Gesteuert Durch Sein Fr Hreifen Schulkamerad Max Demian In Eine Geheime Und Gef Hrliche Welt Der Kleinkriminalit T Und Revolte Gegen Konvention Und Seiner Erwachen Zu Selbstheit

10 thoughts on “Demian: Die Geschichte einer Jugend

  1. says:

    Hermann Hesse s Demian influenced me than just about any book although I haven t read the novel in twenty years Through my late teens and early twenties I searched out every Hesse book I could find, including the rarities, journals, letters, etc., going as far as to ferret out European editions in a Berlin bookstore on a solo trip as much influenced by Hesse as cheap airfare My initial college experiences three institutions in six semesters ended badly I became depressed and, although I had friends, spent much of my time isolated with books My hostile, unsupportive parents created a tense, unsafe environment The future looked bleak I was terrified.But I had Hesse And many of the Hesse protagonists reminded my sad, desperate ass of myself I eventually finished college, scraped out an existence, and learned to survive Later a woman graciously and sympathetically agreed to marry me We moved to Wisconsin When packing up the apartment for the trek north I crated the Hesse books and didn t return to the author for twenty years.A few weeks back I spotted a decent Demian edition, with the Thomas Mann introduction, for a couple bucks at a Borders closing sale I read the book over seven illness ridden gray spring days And while my perceptions of the novel changed, of course, with the passing decades, Hesse s vision once again earned my appreciation.Sinclair, the novel s narrator, is a German teenager transitioning from the warm, safe glow of his childhood world into a much scarier adulthood He tries to follow the rules but feels himself called to something other than the town status quo In school he meets a new student, the mysterious, adult and somewhat feminine Demian Sinclair, through Demian, learns of the individuals with the Mark of Cain These people are special they can t feel fulfilled within the normal societal context and must look elsewhere for meaning Sinclair spends much of his time alone, feels loss and terror, and almost fails out of boarding school Do you see why this setup was attractive to a teenager who felt like he couldn t stand ten minutes in a room with his parents and couldn t pass his first university courses I wanted to feel as if my isolation and third rate social skills had meaning and set me apart with a purpose I couldn t comprehend Demian and Sinclair separate after graduation and the latter experiments with alcoholic hazes before falling under the influence of a new mentor, the benevolent but drunken and limited church organist Pistorus Sinclair paints and creates a vision of a bird breaking out of the egg as metaphor for his own process I wanted so badly to embody that bird, to prove my failures as something deeper than incompetence Sinclair catches up with Demian near the start of what seems to be the second world war, and when they next part they declare themselves part of a new vanguard who will help reshape the world after the military convulsions Demian is flawed Some passages rely on vague, mythic language that mires in mystical and somewhat frustrating possibilities in other words, one could accuse Hesse of taking the easy way out by framing Demian s insight as near indescribable And when Sinclair and Hesse call each other the pair somehow telepathically sense the need to meet This magic, romantic power is easier to describe than anything tangible and even as a teenager I knew this type of interaction was beyond my capabilities and probably bullshit And when Demian says things like The new world has begun and the new world will be terrible for those clinging to the old What will you do he benefits from the lack of detail But none of that mattered to me twenty, twenty five years back Hesse portrayed identity challenged young men who struggled on the edge of mainstream daily existence and hoped for something And while I can see the inherent romanticism and frustrating pseudo spiritualism with older, calmer eyes, I still feel the pull of Hesse s work Without Demian and similar books I would have lacked a voice for emotions I couldn t articulate on my own Hesse s work became a framework around which I could see potential self value at a time in my life when I was precariously close to a feeling worthless And while I can position Demian as a novel that resonates differently with me at forty one than at nineteen, I recognize the camaraderie inherent in this book with a part of me that will never completely disappear Demian is intrinsic to my narrative vocabulary and always will be The vestiges of Hesse s influences are subtle but still present while I like to think I would search for meaning in what I do, beyond convention, without ever reading Hesse, his work provided form and foundation, however mystical, on which I could build as I grew older and hopefully capable Thank you, Mr Hesse, for being there when I needed you most.

  2. says:

    Demian Die Geschichte einer Jugend Demian The Story of Emil Sinclair s Youth, Hermann Hesse First Publication date 1919 Emil Sinclair is a young boy who was raised in a middle class home, amidst what is described as a illusory world Sinclair s entire existence can be summarized as a struggle between two worlds the show world of illusion related to the Hindu concept of maya and the real world, the world of spiritual truth In the course of the novel, Sinclair is caught between good and evil, represented as the light and dark realms Accompanied and prompted by his mysterious classmate and friend Max Demian , he detaches from and revolts against the superficial ideals of the world of appearances and eventually awakens into a realization of self 1974 1346 263 1386 200 9645620457 1392 20 1363 239 1371 258 964560950 1372 1385 1388 1393 9789645609502 1374 197 9645960266 1375 1385 1919

  3. says:

    I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self Why was that so very difficult This quote stands alone on the very first page of the novel, and it tells you all you need to know I loved this book I want to make you love it I sit here at this keyboard and try to write, yet after reading this exquisite novel, everything I have to say sounds trite I type I delete Type some Delete Nothing I say is adequate I feel like I live inside Hermann Hesse s thoughts All of my struggles with morality and purpose and meaning they were his struggles too There were moments while reading this book where I just closed the pages, closed my eyes and thought, Wow I just want to live in THIS moment Suddenly, everything is clear I don t want to read any or think any or talk any I just want to experience THIS So profound was his writing that I can t even manage to explain it to you It s visceral There were moments where that cognitive dissonance that I m constantly battling just stopped It was like a bright light was shone on all my dark tendencies and I could clearly see my true nature Sincerely, it was that profound for me I want it to be profound for you, too Because then maybe, just maybe, we will understand each other You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them They all sense that the rules they live by are no longer valid, that they live according to archaic laws neither their religion nor their mortality is in any way suited to the needs of the present.Everyone who ponders, seeks, wonders, philosophizes everyone who Thinks should read this book.

  4. says:

    I realize today that nothing in the world is distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself Demian is a sad and lonely read it is a thoroughly depressing exploration of the human soul and the adolescent mind The book portrays a general sense of detachment and dispossession with reality and the rest of the world Emil Sincliar is different We all are, in our own way though Emil is separate to everyone else in his solitude He doesn t quite belong with other people he doesn t enjoy the same things and often feels unmoved by things that would directly affect most people he is an outsider looking in, fated to exist apart from the rest of humanity Unlike Harry Haller in Steppenwolf, Emil is not a genius or particularly gifted with anything however, he is a truth seeker he wishes to find the truth of himself in a world that dictates otherwise Society is driven by monetary success, relationship success and occupation success though Emil does not want any of these things he wants to understand human nature at its very core so he can better understand himself and his own place within this world He is suicidal, depressed and exhausted with the realities of modern existence I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me He looks within himself and finds the answers Through the words of a friend, he realises that morality, that good and evil, that god and the devil, are not necessarily diametrically opposed but are part of larger whole one entity that exists in union Sounds like Hesse has been reading Nietzsche His soul becomes less fractured and his person becomes solid as a result He is ready to be born anew with his knew knowledge thus, he expresses himself in art, art that echoes the images and ideas of the surrealists As with most modernist works, Demian is an absolute treasure trove of psychoanalytical theory Part of me considered that none of the events are real or the characters, but are mere tools used by the author and our narrator Emil to express his mental states and his sense of anguish in a world that he feels apart from Despite being a relatively short work, the narrative is dense and obscure I would love to read this in conjunction with Jung or Freud and consider the implications of the dreams and the expressions of emotions There s certainly a lot to pick apart here This is a very clever book, though I don t think it is nearly as successful as Steppenwolf, which explores similar themes to a higher degree of effectiveness it is, nevertheless, definitely worth a read for the philosophically minded.

  5. says:

    i am so glad i give authors three books to make me love them this was hesses last chance to woo me, and he really almost got a five star valentine from me, but we will call it a four and a half must be a little coy, after all this is a book that i would love to go back in time and give myself upon graduating from high school i would love to know whether it would have made me or less insufferable than i am now because i could see it going either way, at seventeen i could see myself taking this as a cautionary tale, in a way, or i could see myself going whole hog into some sort of mystical, quasi intellectual liter orgical spree and alienating everyone around me i can see myself smoking a pipe and holding court with my philosophies and my revelations ohhhh my revelations as it is, i held no court i just finished it on the subway, took moll flanders out of my bag, and started reading that, in some quiet bookish equivalent to chain smoking but o what could have been

  6. says:

    But every man is than just himself he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again That is why every man s story is important, eternal, sacred that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration It s quite timely that I read this one so soon after reading Zweig s tale Burning Secret about a young boy leaving childhood This book followed a similar thread, a boy named Emil goes through his personal journey of becoming, and it definitely goes into depth Unlike Zweig s book, our protagonist comes of age in the real world, not in an isolated setting, and he does so with a sort of spiritual guide, a curious boy named Demian I haven t read Hesse since I was a teenager and I think this book would have been even impactful to me at that time, when I was trying to discover myself and choose my path Even so, I really did enjoy this book and I found myself relating so much to this little German boy, something I never expected to be able to do.Entering the mind of a child on the journey to find out who he or she is, something I hadn t thought of for a long time, was very interesting because it s so easy to forget that we all go through this phase, a time of pain or angst for many when we lose our innocence, learn new things, discover new philosophies, and struggle to find meaning I felt I could relate to the younger Emil, which makes sense because he and I chose very different paths Hesse is very philosophical and I enjoyed the conversation on spirituality and dualism although I can t necessarily say I agreed with them I was left with several thought provoking quotes, some I will include here I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me Each man s life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path Examine a person closely enough and you know about him than he does himself I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self Why was that so very difficult

  7. says:

    . demon

  8. says:

    Man knows how much powder it takes to kill a man, but doesn t know how to be happy DemianUpdate, 7 3 19 I reread this with a small group of students reading Growing Up novels We have read so far James Joyce s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Jeffery Eugenides The Virgin Suicides and now this All three I realize deal with the struggle between spirituality and sensuality for young people coming of age Original review, edited a little, 8 6 18 Demian The Story of Emil Sinclair s Youth is a 1919 novel situated early on in pre WWI world of an adolescent boy, Emil, who early on is bullied, with Max Demian intervening on his behalf I first read it when I was 16 and was thoroughly engaged in it It wasn t until I reread it recently that I realized how it had influenced my early thinking about spirituality and identity More accessible than Steppenwolf or even Siddhartha, it was one of my very favorite Hesse books, because it situates the spiritual and in this case Hindi and psychological in this case Jungian ideas in a story of what seem to be real young people as opposed to abstractions, though some scenes featuring just ideological spiritual conversations can seem pretty abstract It s a story, like most Hesse stories, about a young man in the west specifically Germany, and probably Hesse himself who comes to Enlightenment by trying to fuse different things he cares about from western and eastern philosophical traditions The early bullying trauma is the most engaging section of the book because it is the most narrative, feels the most real, like it is pulled right out of Hesse s own life The rest of the book is a kind of condensed developmental allegory of the coming of age ideas of Emil There are a variety of boys who help lead Emil, a good boy, along a path of doubting the conventional religion with which he was raised, into a time of worldly pursuits and drinking, and back somewhat in the direction of the Light, the Sacred, and self realization.Max Demian is a kind of doppleganger, a shadow self, in Emil Sinclair s Jungian struggle between the shadow and the light The dialogues in the book between Demian and Sinclair and other, older boys in the book feel real enough, but they can also be seen as self or inner dialogues Demian gets him to question conventional interpretations of Biblical stories He gets him to be skeptical, to doubt, to freely interpret everything he sees and reads There is a kind of Jungian dualism that Sinclair struggles with, and a Hindu struggle between the world of illusion the Hindu concept of Maya and the real world, the world of spiritual truth, but it is different than the Good Evil dualism of Christianity in which he was raised.The backdrop of the book is WWI, and a sense that the world must die before it is reborn into a better thing The bird struggles out of the egg The egg is the world Who would be born must first destroy a world The bird then flies to God That God s name is Abraxas Abraxas would seem to be the God of a New Religion that emerges when people see through their worldly illusions This didn t really work out, Herman, did it Or it may have for a few million people, but not far enough to truly transform the planet It s interesting to see the trend in the US to seek women politicians to replace rapaciously worldly men Because in Hesse s conception, Emil falls in love with a girl named Beatrice that represents to him a kind of spiritual ideal consistent with this New Religion I think Email Hesse thinks going the way of women is generally better than the way of men.Emil Sinclair later in the book seems to fall in love, too, with Frau Eva, Max Demian s mother, whom he views as an image of the Universal Mother, which maybe evolved into the sixties conception of the Earth Mother, a feminist environmental ideal that was seen as possibly a key to saving the planet Emil sees Eva as a Goddess image, the Female ideal, representing an ethereal, sensual, emotional life in contrast to the world of men that leads us to death and war Ironically, most of Sinclair s transformations happens through conversations in and through intense relationships with boys, such as Demian and Pistorius Not teachers, but somewhat older boys who open up his mind to different ideas Interestingly, for a guy who develops a kind of Goddess ideal, Emil has almost no real connection to women or girls at all, so he idealizes them in various ways If he meets a woman, such as Beatrice, he thinks about her, he watches her, but never really talks to her Other boys seem to have early sexual experiences, but not Sinclair And yet Woman becomes for Emil the Ideal Spiritual bodily guide for him Sinclair s challenge Can he find a way to weave together sexuality the body, attraction, something renounced by Christianity and holiness the Spirit in Love And to find the Feminine in himself without completing renouncing the Masculine Not opposites, but a fusion of the two.Demian and Max fight in WWI, and one can see how Demian the book was so popular among young anti war people in 1919, after the war to end all wars, and again in the anti Vietnam War sixties early seventies What Hesse encourages is for young people to discover their true selves, and to follow their inner vision Love can be part of that process, of course, but it never seems to me a truly social love, or a social self, with a commitment to changing the world Hesse s is a spiritual quest, a quest for Self Enlightenment When I was 16 I was highly encouraged to make what we called in the Dutch Reformed Church Profession of Faith in keeping with the tenets of the Heidelberg Catechsim, which we had to basically memorize over a series of years I was a skeptic, taking notes on sermons I heard that made me worry about my church s Calvinist grounding in Original Sin We were all in my church s most conservative version of this view to see ourselves fundamentally as Sinners During this same year I read Demian and other works by Hesse And in the next couple years, I would read the existentialists, and Dostoevsky It was my Aunt Florence who emerged in this time as my Universal Mother A one time flapper, an artist, a teacher, a nudist, joyful, not at all like my Dutch Reformed traditions She told me once when I was maybe fourteen that she had never believed in the idea of Hell, and this sort of stunned me, because I could never understand it, either, but I was surprised and glad to find someone who agreed with me within my family Like Emil, who was confirmed in his Church even as he left it, I made my parents happy and made a Profession of Faith, even as I faced the possibility of being drafted in the Vietnam war Unlike Emil and Demian, I never served in the military nor fired a weapon in a war.I was possessed as a young man like Emil with intense feelings ranging from joy to self pity to melancholy, which is to say adolescence, I guess, and my experience like Emil s featured intense discussions of books and the ideas embodied in them Self exploration was central for me at 16, and what contributions I might make to the needs other people were secondary, until I decided to work in a psychiatric institution for some years, and then become a teacher I very much liked revisiting my past self through this book I maybe didn t love it as much as I did when I first read it, but I will hold on to my 5 starring of it that I felt then.

  9. says:

    The things I do for BTSJoking, this was one of the few books that really had an impact on my way of thinking It talked about religion, belief and growth in a very profound way, as if Hesse wasn t really writing but conversing directly with my mind.Sinclair and Demian, though being very peculiar and surreal characters, were one the mirror of the other, surrounded by a plot heavy with symbolism and magical elements.The idea of the two worlds, one so close to the other that you could esily slip into one another is very fascinating and paonts a very sad but true picture of the human being and its behaviour The bird fights its way out of the egg The egg is the world Who would be born must first destroy a world The bird flies to God The God s name is Abraxas